August 18, 2003, Midlothian. Virginia Systems announces the immediate availability of a new plug-in for both the Windows and Macintosh versions of Adobe InDesign. The plug-in, Sonar Bookends InSeq, automatically numbers figures and tables in a document.

Sonar Bookends InSeq makes working with figures and tables easy. Simply insert or remove a figure or table, tell Sonar Bookends InSeq to update the sequence numbers, and then in seconds all existing figures and tables ("destinations") are completely renumbered. Just as importantly, all locations where figures or tables are referenced ("references") are updated, too.

To insert a figure/table reference or destination, simply place the cursor where the figure/table number is to go and select either "Reference" or "Destination" from the menu. Sonar Bookends InSeq uses labels to associate figure/table references with destinations. A label can be selected from a pop-up list of currently defined labels or a new label can be entered manually. Destination types are set to be either "figure" or "table" because figures and tables are numbered independently of each other.

A document can consist of one file or many files. Figure and table numbers can go sequentially from file to file, or they can restart at one for each file. The figure/table numbers can be imbedded to give a more complicated figure or table name format:

Figure 4.27A

(underlined text in the above example is the automatically inserted figure number)

Formatting the reference and destination numbers is easy because each is automatically marked with a style sheet. Thus, by editing two style sheets, all of the figure and table numbers are reformatted for both references and destinations.

A free demo of this product is available on Virginia Systems' web site.

Sonar Bookends InSeq is $195 for either the Macintosh or Windows version.

Virginia Systems was founded in 1984 and specializes in document imaging, text retrieval, automatic index-generation, cross-referencing, and footnote software.